As we lie down to sleep the world turns half away

–Elizabeth Bishop

I question whether it’s past time

to pierce my ears, dangle silver hoops,

feathers, add a small tattoo of a wine-

colored bird at the curve of my clavicle,

slip on a pair of stilettos, something low-cut.

All those years beauty wasn’t supposed

to matter. Now it does. I want what

I would have wanted then— a dress

on fire, love beneath the northern lights,

a river of curls no man could ever swim.

for a traveling circus acrobat

You swing here from the East
where nothing is dusty —

just diesel and domes. Where
church spires are syringes

flushed from earth like
strung-out doves, pinpricked

vessels of stupor. Here, cows
cluster in gangs. They chaw

and low. I wish you’d unhook
my blouse, sewn from spit

and calico. But aloft, you sweat
your way through your spiraling

grabs: hand, twist, air — hand.
The dumb meat weight of you

pikes, curls back on itself
like a peeled plum’s skin —

one scared to be caught
staring by the knife. Still

what’s left to risk, or fear? Fists,
maybe. Rope burn. The perpetual

stink of pigs and tractor grease. More
bars like the one you hang from,

showman. But the Big Top’s got
spicier acts than you. Lions seethe

on their stools, their tails like scythes
to slash wheat. And clowns boil

from their red-hot car. They pop
and roll like bath plugs, yanked

from scalded sinks. So, what
would it take for you to blister

your own way down
past the net — the shock

on our Midwestern faces? Are you brave
enough to strike

up a homestead here, in the flattest
form of sky? Fall upwards

at us, like haystacks made you
some sawdust promise: that a girl

would catch you in her
burlap sack. No greater show on

earth: not milk barns. Not flies.
No need to scream on your arrival.

“I will die completely cured.”
-Salvador Dali

On our last night we stared for five minutes at van Gogh’s Skull
of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette & I asked if he meant it
as an anti-smoking lesson. Libby laughed, her hair like Clouds
-era Joni Mitchell buoyant as her shoulders shook. We spent

that summer cross-legged in front of paintings she translated
into poems: Landscapes are like sonnets, she would say, & Dali
paints only odes. I nodded, told her how close I was to getting it:
a job, an apartment, the shortest route uptown & up the back

stairwell to meet her, how to write poems that could be headed
by brutal stick-figure scenes instead of titles. Human sculptures
creeped me out the most, the threat of having my head forever
rolled & bronzed. What greater gift could there be than being

forgotten? Maybe Dali meant our greatest cures are red velvet
curtains in a windowless room, an underground tomb guarded
in eternity by a terra-cotta infantry. & above ground, we remain
defenseless, picking up what’s within reach. This knife is just

a bullhorn I sharpened with my teeth. Running away is a retreat
only if announced by a bugle & a band of screams. Maybe
Dali meant dying too is a cure. Libby would know. Beneath
the trees in the sculpture garden, she would say What he meant

is a prose poem with no line breaks. Her hands over my eyes,
she would whisper What he meant is I get a head start this time,
then race ahead of me, her laugh careening beyond the weeping
beeches & into the narrow streets, a parade at last unloosed.

headline from a small-town newspaper

I imagine your breath smells —
though I’ve never seen you close

enough to sniff you, or even
wave to you from a window

of a car, piloted by me or another
daylight driver. Though once, long

ago, at summer camp, I saw a horse
wipe its dripping snot on a girl’s

sheer skirt. It was more of a slide
than a swipe, but still. We shrieked.

The girl never returned: she’d been
dismissed for her behavior —

a tale that went unshared
with the bulk of us, left snorting

at the hinted story. So why
does your foray into town

seem funnier than any news
I’ve read today? You’ve emerged before

in various guises — suitor with an accent;
a lost clown in Groucho Marx glasses —

all through the state
of banked hay and confusion

that can mark a rural life. Pity the ripe
bear, grabbing at loaves

of stone-soft bread from the counter
of growled hopes: at the scent

of stale humor, thin mockery
and rank, timid despair. It will go hungry.

I was eighteen when my grandfather gave me the vintage 1974 Leica M4 he bought the year I
was born. I hardly took shots with it; I was still afraid of everything then, of breaking that
precious hardware my grandfather spent so much money on. Afraid of losing it to the St.
Bernard-faced thief skulking around the apartments. So I hid it: a witch storing up Hansel. That
afternoon, I slogged home from the beach after the hardest breakup of my life, believing—as I
heated the oven for pizza—that this separation was the most savage of all losses. I wanted to
eat and scream. Seven minutes of heat baked my fattened Hansel: the M4’s innards, a livened
roux. Muscles, tendons splayed open like a sloughed heart. I plucked the M4 from its catacomb
and became violently ill. I was sick for weeks, stomach lurching when I would near the kitchen,
throat clogged with all the things you feel when your life is ravaged, when the only thing you
treasured, the only thing you staked your life on, that one thing, was gone. I lost 25 pounds. I
lost an internship at The Institute for Marine Mammal Studies. I could no longer tell which of the
ruined things I was: the witch, the thief, the fattened sacrifice, the heart, or its petrified inner
workings.

I went from market to market for years, because Mexico is in its markets
– Pablo Neruda

inhale

fried pig skin

peppers

tortillas

dirt

car tires                                               cigarette smoke

dry wood

violin strings

fresh paint

concrete dust

exhale

when did my hands get so many wrinkles?

why is the mountain so violent toward the clouds?

how did that dog get on top of that building?

what does my cock look like to the man in the urinal next to me?

reflection in a window

i am

at least

until i

turn away

I like football, ketchup on my scrambled eggs.

My biggest sin, perhaps, is I speak English to my parents.

I’m a bad Mexican. Yet, I like carne asada over BBQ,

Latina women who speak Spanish in my ear.

I root for México in soccer. I’m a bad American, too.

I like Sunday morning rain. Winter holidays.

I’ve found solace in the jaded moon. Not everything is this,

Or that. I once spelled my name as “Joey.”

Was born in a racist nation. Not a troublemaker, just call it

Like I see it. My patriotism: red, white, and blue. I’ve got

Two tattoos on my chest: a Mexican flag, and American, too.

My children will likely speak less Spanish than me.

Does that make you happy? I’m trying to do better: leyendo

Poesía por la noche. Fusion is more than a cable channel in my barrio.

It was said before me, it will be said after: how you treat

Folks is all that matters to the dying question:

How do you want to be remembered?

and she laughs. oh, baby—baby, this damn world’s been ending
for damn ever. she plunks her translucent body

down on your blank side of the bed. you, that other ghost,
who did not come to comfort me. the mattress is memory foam

and so does not register her weight, but if it wasn’t,
it would: she is that kind of ghost. substantive. bodily

as a weighted blanket. carrie fisher holds my face, tucks a lock
of oily hair behind my ear. so: it’s ending. so it’s ending!

so? even at 10% opacity her eyes are dark and twinkling. her phantom
palm is warm against my cheek. when’s the last time you ate something?

i don’t have a good answer for her. she reaches toward
my nightstand, maracas the pill bottle. honey, take your meds. i’ll go

run you a bath. and you—peering into my closet—find something scandalous
to wear. carrie fisher laughs again, and this time i hear the sorrow in it. i mean. baby,

the world is ending! we might as well
be divine.

For V

The clouds are flaking embers again, evergreens
spraining their necks. Words reach my tongue
and hatch into a swarm of robber flies. They wilt
and crumble in the Holocene sun as it sets within me.
Parking lot mountain range of snow, an orangely-lavender contrail
that floats like an opposite spirit above a telephone wire. And there,
the motionless black outline of a lone kestrel, too late now for it to
think of love or hunger, only waiting for a distant gunshot to pull it from
this scene—this pine resin gloaming, this pink champagne death rattle.
Dusk sutures the horizon, violent and salacious. Sodium arcs push us back
into the middle road of our own shadows. We were never really here.

My husband Amir tells me, “better

to have a tall man,” as he gets riz

from the cupboard’s top shelf.

His Kalashnikov’s under the sink.

Bombs rattle the pots and pans.

He rips open the ten-kilo sack.

Who will cook for him tomorrow?

Me, in his arms.

dirt and motor oil stain his shirt.

“How’d that happen?’ “No matter,”

he answers, watching the news

while we eat. Tomorrow, I’ll go

to my mother’s never to return.

For the men my husband’s age,

the streets are tombs.

The fan cuts air like a chopper.

His skin gone numb to wind,

he adjusts his fatigues. The gun

comes out from under the sink.

“Bidak chai?” I say and he says:

“Habibtee. I don’t have time.” I reach

for his beret but it is too far.